Essex sale, 7,100 guineas, 1891; ‘Helvoetsluys,’ Price sale, 6,400 guineas, 1895; and at the Pender sale in 1897, ‘Venice, the Giudecca,’ &c. (1841), 6,800 guineas; ‘Depositing John Bellini's three Pictures in La Chiesa Redentore, Venice’ (1841), 7,000 guineas; ‘Mercury and Herse’ (1811), 7,500 guineas, and ‘Wreckers’ (1834), 7,600 guineas.
Turner's private life was sordid and sensual, but he was a good son, a staunch friend, and grateful to those who had been kind to him. He was miserly by habit, but he could be generous at times. His heart was very tender; he never spoke ill of any one; he was kind to children, and would not distrain on his tenants. Though rough in manners to the outside world, he was genial and convivial with his brother artists, and full of a shrewd and merry humour. He intended to devote the whole of his fortune for the benefit of artists and art, and he conferred an inestimable benefit on the nation by the bequest of his pictures and drawings. Though in his later years he was offered a large sum for pictures, in order that they might be preserved to the nation, he refused to take the money because he had ‘willed’ them to the nation himself. He was for some time greatly interested in the Artists' Benevolent Fund, and the students of the Royal Academy owe him a debt of gratitude for the institution of the ‘Turner’ medal for landscape.
Besides the works by Turner at the National Gallery, the South Kensington Museum, and the British Museum, others are to be found in all the principal art galleries and museums throughout the country. Fine collections of Turner drawings have been given by Mr. Ruskin to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the Whitworth Institute at Manchester contains another collection (principally consisting of his earlier works), presented by Mr J. E. Taylor and others.
[Thornbury's Life (founded on letters and papers), London, 2 vols. 1862; Hamerton's Life, with nine illustrations, 1879; Monkhouse's Turner in Great Artists Series, 1882; Alaric Watts's Memoir in Liber Fluviorum, 1853; Peter Cunningham's Memoir in John Burnet's Turner and his Works, 1852–9; Wornum's Turner Gallery, 1859; Thomas Miller's Turner and Girtin's Picturesque Views, 1852; Art Journal, January 1852, January 1857; Athenæum, December 1851, January 1852; Ruskin's Modern Painters, Preterita &c.; Daye's Professional Sketches of Modern Artists; Redgraves' Century; Redgrave's Dict.; Rawlinson's Liber Studiorum; Leslie's Life of Constable; Leslie's Autobiography; Leslie's Handbook for Young Painters; Encyclopædia Britannica; Pye and Roget's Notes on Turner's Liber Studiorum; Roget's ‘Old Watercolour’ Society; Pye's Patronage of British Art; Cat. of Burlington Fine Art Soc.—Watercolours 1871, Liber Studiorum 1872, Architectural Subjects 1884; Cyrus Redding's Autobiography; Cat. of Manchester Whitworth Institute; Monkhouse's Early English Painters in Watercolour; unpublished correspondence.]
TURNER, MATTHEW (d. 1788?), chemist and freethinker, was a man of unusual attainments. ‘A good surgeon, a skilful anatomist, a practised chemist, a draughtsman, a classical scholar, and a ready wit, he formed one of a group of eminently intellectual men, who did much to foster a literary and artistic taste among the more educated classes at Liverpool’ (Meteyard, Life of Wedgwood, 1865, i. 300). In 1762, while residing at John Street in Liverpool, and practising as a surgeon, he was called on to attend Josiah Wedgwood [q. v.], and introduced him to Thomas Bentley (1731–1780) [q. v.] He afterwards supplied Wedgwood with ‘varnishes, fumigations, bronze powders, and other chemical appliances’ for his establishment at Burslem (ib. ii. 16, 80). He also introduced Joseph Priestley [q. v.] to the subject of chemistry in a series of lectures delivered at Warrington about 1765 (Rutt, Memoirs of Priestley, 1831, i. 76). He was one of the founders of the Liverpool Academy of Art in 1769, and in that year and afterwards, upon the two revivals of the academy in 1773 and 1783, he delivered lectures upon anatomy and the theory of forms (Hist. Soc. Lancashire and Cheshire, Proceedings and Papers, 1853–4, v. 147, vi. 71, 72).
Turner was a man of powerful and original mind. In politics he was not merely a whig, but a republican, and openly sympathised with the American colonies. He was also an atheist, and, though he did not venture to display his religious views with the same frankness, yet in 1782 he published ‘An Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever,’ London, 8vo, under the pseudonym of ‘William Hammon,’ in which he attacked Priestley's argument from design with considerable cogency. A new edition was published by Richard Carlile [q. v.] in 1826. Turner's attack drew from Priestley ‘Additional Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever,’ 1782; 2nd edit. 1787. In 1787 Turner attested a codicil in the will of his friend John Wyke (ib. p. 75). His name does not appear in the Liverpool ‘Directory’ for 1790, so that it is possible he died between these two dates.
[Authorities cited above; information kindly given by the Rev. A. Gordon.]
